At the 2005 SAA annual meeting in New Orleans, there was a session on just
this topic, on how people let their titles or degrees define them (often for
reasons of social status), instead of defining what they do by the
responsibilities of the job at hand.
Several years ago, I tried to discuss an archival issue with someone who was
head of an important architectural archives. He cut off the discussion by
saying "Oh, I'm a curator, so I really don't have to know archival work."
He was head of one of the more important architectural archival collections
in the country and yet because of his title, he thought he didn't have to
know "archival work." The fact that he was responsible for major archival
collections and for running an archives didn't matter. He never bothered to
learn archival work, he never bothered to go to an archival workshop, he
wouldn't have been caught dead at an SAA meeting. His title was "curator,"
so that was that.
In 1989 I visited a small Wisconsin county museum. In a back room were about
twenty volunteers sitting at half a dozen card tables. The museum had just
acquired a relatively large archival collection and the volunteers,
supervised by museum curators, were meticulously taking each piece of paper,
flattening it, cleaning it, transcribing it, indexing it, and then moving on
to the next piece of paper.
In other words, they were applying curatorial methods (or what they thought
were curatorial methods) to an archival collection, treating each piece of
paper as an individual artifact worthy of the highest standards of museum,
not archival, practice. The result was predictable: enormous resources
wasted on a project that shouldn't have taken a hundredth of the time or
money.
In the years since, I've repeatedly witnessed museum employees applying
museum practices to archival collections. Much worse, I've often witnessed
museums acquiring documents as if they were artifacts, picking and choosing
the "best examples" from a fonds or "cherry picking" what they thought was
important out of an archival collection and throwing away the rest.
I have also repeatedly witnessed a sort of reverse version of this:
archivists who did not understand the difference between archival, library,
and museum materials. They therefore accessioned library and museum items
into their archival collections and applied archival procedures to them. I'
ve seen archivists consider every "thing" donated as a valuable artifact and
so they keep all and weed nothing (with their ignorance being a convenient
and lazy excuse not to make difficult appraisal decisions). I was fascinated
by the note to the listserv last week from someone who said her boss defined
"archival" as "something donated," so anything a donor gives them is
permanently preserved and placed in the archives. That happens more often
than you would think.
In other words, your title, your degrees, where you got your training and
experience, are all pretty much crap. The archival profession needs to do a
far, far better job of making the point that regardless of someone's title,
a person responsible for archival collections had damn well better be an
archivist, had better have a thorough professional-level understanding of
archival theory and practice (which, in the US today, usually means an MLS
with a minimum of twelve semester credit hours in areas defined as core
archival knowledge followed by archival certification within a year or two
of graduation, although that is not quite yet the only route) and had better
be able to apply archival theory and practice to their work.
If you are responsible for archives, then it doesn't matter if your title is
curator, librarian, butcher, baker, or candlestick maker; despite your
title, you should be an archivist, and archival values should drive
everything you do.
----
Leon C. Miller, Manuscripts Librarian
Special Collections, Jones Hall
Tulane University Libraries
New Orleans, Louisiana 70118
ph: 504-865-5685, fx: 504-865-5761, [log in to unmask]
http://specialcollections.tulane.edu
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